What are some games with simple, clean 3D graphics?
I'm not talking about a clean aesthetic, like in Antichamber or Portal, just that there's not a vomit-inducing massive mess of polygons everywhere muddying up the screen.
Pic related is a great example of what I mean.
Everybody and their transdimensional grandmother knows that one.
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All 3D games made between 1998 and 2005 for 6th generation consoles and PC?
I wouldn't say all, or even most in that period. Drop it from 05 to 02 and I'll agree with you, as in 03 games started to get more detailed.
They started using more bump mapping and normal mapping and other visual tricks, but polygon counts were still basically the same.
True, but that was enough to lose the aesthetic
Oh shit, OP you done it now-
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There was a transitioning period from 2d to 3d when the hardware that was affordable for the average end consumer couldn't render lots of fancy effects, large textures, or lots of objects/polygons. The levels had to be simple and clean if they wanted to succeed and run at a respectable frame-rate on the end hardware. The Quake 1 screenshot shown here, even with the heavy use of brownish reds and brownish browns, is still easy read, simple, and clean.
I'm reminded of a talk Mark Ferrari gave about just having 256 colors to work with for the longest time and how he felt like some of his best, most creative works came out of it. How he was able to push the tools and the medium to the limit. If developers learned restraint I think we would get better games out of it.
If you want to see some of Mark Ferrari's 8bit art that uses color cycling, effectgames.com
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:Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight
Dead Rising 1. Even though there's a lot of detail in the environments you can actually tell items from the environment, plus the map was small but well designed enough that you can remember a lot of locations by heart without relying on your map.
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Any PSX or N64 3D game on an emulator?
The Turing Test comes to mind if you want a more recent game.
However, I don't know about the quality of the game as I haven't looked at it in-depth
Mario 64 looks nice and clean.
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Running With Rifles. It's top-down 3D, but still 3D.
Tron 2.0, its quite good.
Tribes 2 has some pretty sweet graphics for a 2001 game, taking into consideration that it allows 64 players in a server.
Basically anything before PS3 multiplat era.
Its bloom and fog cancer spread onto every platform since then.
Everything pre-PS3/360 era. For some reason when we got to that point devs started prioritizing how many polgyons they could cram into the game and the idea of good texture work died.
Thief was pretty simple and clean in the graphics department. Most games from 1998 to 2004 or so were like that, so this thread is a little narrow.
One cool thing about Thief was that the textures actually mattered to the gameplay: walking on carpet was quiet, while walking on marble was loud, for example.
This gave me PSTD
You could have just said you can't think of any examples and have no idea what you're talking about
Unreal Engine 3 basically ruined graphics for that generation.
I'd describe thief's geometry as messy and organic more than anything.